Memo To President-Elect Muhammad

Memo To President-Elect Muhammadu Buhari

Jibo Nura

“This memo is dedicated to all victims of bad leadership in Nigeria”

Mr. President-elect,

Congratulations on winning the 2015 presidential election. I am happy that fellow countrymen and women, youth, children, friends and colleagues of Nigeria have chosen you as President. May God guide all your actions and put you on the right path. May He make it possible for you to give Nigerians the desired change they need. I was one of those that were at many points in time skeptical about the happenings in the country. Indeed, I was damn right hostile to PDP’s headship since Obasanjo era. I feel very disturbed and seriously worried over the fate of our nation, especially under the ruling of President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. My resolve, had Jonathan and PDP lost and decided not to relinquish power by continuing with their type of rulership, was to give a breathing space to Nigeria by seeking refuge in either Dakar or Kumasi with family.

However, going by the present turnout of event, I feel motivated and highly encouraged, secured and joyous to stay and uphold your slogan of salvaging Nigeria from the comatose situation it’s been deliberately thrown in. As you rightly pointed out since 1985, “we have no other country than Nigeria”. Hence we must remain and “salvage it together”. Because, it is our one and only country that we can call home.

I am, therefore, writing you this simple memo with the hope that your government will be very different from the previous governments in Nigeria that too often spend much energy doing things they shouldn’t do.

The nation’s problem is so much that former presidents were not able to effectively tackle it. They had much business to do with converting state-owned run-industries and firms into private ones. They embraced this ideology from the IMF and the World Bank. Unfortunately, these two multinational institutions have misconstrued and misunderstood the issues from a narrow ideological perspective. This was exactly what a world renowned Economist and 2001 Nobel Prize laureate, Joseph Stiglitz has been professionally struggling to make them understand that privatization of public properties should not be pursued rapidly, because scorecards are always kept for the countries transiting from social to capitalist market. Those who privatized faster, according to Stiglitz, are given “high” marks. Hence, privatization of Nigeria’s public properties such as NEPA and NITEL did not bring the benefits that we were promised. This problem created antipathy to the epistemological question and real definition on the importance or otherwise of privatization in Nigeria.

Interestingly, most of those people that sold Nigeria’s properties and assets have now gathered around you. But, you shouldn’t be deceived by their support gesture. Some of them are with you to seek cover from the atrocities they committed. It is only the sensible ones amongst them that have realized and acknowledged their mistakes. And I am sure they regretted doing what they did overtly or covertly.

In November 2012 I visited a village in Stockholm to see the impact of projects undertaken by IMF and World Bank on the lives of rural people. I did not see any that genuinely transformed their lives to the zenith. In December 2014, I was on a journey to South America. I visited indigenous people and communities in Loreto, along the Amazon River – engaged in community based rural tourism in Sulluscocha and Chagmapampo and down to Porcon Farm. I did not see any IMF and World Bank genuinely inspired projects either. Instead, I saw in North Africa, Morocco to be precise, an NGO that had assisted villagers raise chickens – an enterprise that the village women could perform as they continued with their traditional chores. Initially, the women used to obtain their seven-day-old chicks from a government enterprise. But that ‘new’ inspired chicken business enterprise had collapsed. I found out that the reason for the village women’s chicken business collapse was because the IMF told the government in Morocco that it should not be in the business of distributing chicks to people.

The only World Bank’s realistically assisted project that I saw was in Callao Municipality and La Cucaracha in Peru where refuse dumps and garbage are converted into electricity. Their old electricity plants are transformed into a model sanitary landfill. They treat waste produced daily in Lima. The plants reduce CO_2eemissions by 61.02 tons per annum, significantly helping to mitigate the effects of climate change.

Mr. President, if this kind of project can be done in Nigeria it could meet Nigeria’s high demand for electricity and sanitary landfills. It is a model that can be easily applied throughout Nigeria since more than 70% of the country’s solid wastes are disposed of improperly. The income that will be generated from this clean development mechanism will reduce the costs of service for Nigerian cities and for residents across the country. It will lessen drastically our over reliance on Dams and Rivers to generate electricity. Since you left the corridors of power in August 1985, you are in the know that electricity supply in the country is terribly erratic. Nigerians have since then been left with enormous electricity bills to settle, because the state’s owned electricity has been privatized. Poor people in the rural areas no longer have hopes and dreams of seeing the light. More so, an average civil servant in Nigeria is now playing the role of a local government area in his house. He produces his own electricity by Generator. He gives himself Medicare; drinking water via boreholes; and pays for his children’s exorbitant school fees etc. He uses the meager salary that is paid to him on these basic things that are supposed to be made available to him by government.

Not to talk of those rural dwellers that did not even know how and what salary is all about. They are stranded, because they have been ravaged by abject poverty. The downtrodden masses are left hopeless in urban and rural areas. Their lives are day in day out becoming socially and economically frustrated.

The point I am trying to make is that privatization, removal of government subsidies and social welfare benefits on basic needs such as food, shelter, water, fuel and electricity, cannot work for developing nations such as Nigeria. Stiglitz along with many other observers points out that “A decade after the Uruguay Round, more than two-thirds of farm income in Norway and Switzerland came from subsidies, more than half in Japan, and one-third in the EU. For some crops, like sugar and rice, the subsidies amounted to as much as 80 percent of farm income. The aggregate agricultural subsidies of the United States, EU and Japan, for example, including hidden subsidies on water, if they do not actually exceed the total income of sub-Saharan Africa, amount to at least 75 percent of the region’s income, making it almost impossible for African farmers to compete in world markets. The average European cow, gets a subsidy of $2 a day (the World Bank’s measure of poverty)”. More than seventy (70) percent of the people living in Nigeria today live on less than $1 per day. This means it is better to be a cow in Europe than to be a poor person in a developing country like Nigeria.

The Nigerian Farmer lives with an average annual income of N50,000 per annum. He ekes a living on a small plots of semi arid or/ and marshy land. There is no money for irrigation and he is too poor to afford fertilizer, a tractor, or high-quality seeds, unlike his colleagues in California that can farm a huge tract of hundreds of acres, using all the tech. of modern farming. Nonetheless, the California Farmer simply couldn’t compete in a fair global marketplace were it not for further direct government subsidies that provide half or more of his income. I originally came from one of the villages in northern Nigeria where you hardly get five people that earn or/ and get N20 each for a whole week. I tested and seen real life in the village where in the entire neighbourhoods you hardly get a household that could cook soup with groundnut oil not to talk of putting Daddawa and Maggi. It’s a local soup (Tafashi Kada) made up of boiled water, salt, Kuka (Baobab leaf powder) and Borkono (Pepper). That type of village was the kind that many of it was ravaged by Boko Haram insurgents in Maiduguri, Gombe, Bauchi, Kano and Adamawa. During your time in 1985, you defeated Mai tatsine insurgents. I believe, this time around too you are in the right position to handle the Boko Haram situation. And it will be good to send a team to the Department of Political Science, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria to study late Prof. Sabo Bako’s PhD thesis on Mai tatsine and other religious insurgencies such as Boko Haram. I read virtually a whole lot of it. Therein, he proffered several solutions that had to do with religious insurgencies that are caused by proletariat-bourgeoisie class struggle. And I think Dr. Kabiru Mato of the Institute of Legislative Studies, Abuja can play a significant role in leading the research team to ABU.

The Boko Haram insurgency cannot be unconnected with deep seated resentment between the largely poor uneducated youth – the have-nots, and nonchalant, thieving, insensitive educated northern elite – the haves.

For example, late Mohammed Yusuf and Shekau were once ordinary knowledge seekers – Almajirai. The very many types of Mohammeds and Shekaus that we have in our midst today are the ones that somehow met with religious scholars in Maiduguri who gave them their own version and meaning of Islam based on their “understanding” of it.

Sadly, our Islamic clerics in northern Nigeria have not done their homework very well in educating those teeming Almajirai that roam about on the streets of northern Nigeria.

When we were kids, there was a day I and my brothers wronged daddy. He threatened that he would take us to Gabas – north and dump us there as Almajirai – street beggars or/and knowledge seekers. And literally that Gabas to my understanding is Maiduguri. Today, all we could get from Gabas is Boko Haram. Courtesy of Almajiranci.

Suleiman Hashimu – the Ibadan-based construction worker that trekked from Lagos to Abuja and met with you in celebration of your victory at the polls did it because you represent hope. To him you are an opposite of Nigeria’s elite. The many Suleiman-like that we have in Nigeria believed that you are a symbol of justice, truth, honesty and a bright future. These qualities and high expectation from you are something that no one offered the poor in Nigeria, but you. The poor are, indeed, aware of, and can easily recall in their minds your social welfare and community development programme at the grassroots. The corporative stores that your government used in 1984-85 and provided goods and consumables – Kayan Masarufi at subsidized prices, are an indelible memory, which poor Nigerians are dearly anticipating from your in-coming government. They believe that the days of monopolized importation of goods such as sugar, rice, spaghetti and flour are over, because you will open up and effectively control the demand and supply market for the benefit of all and sundry. The poor man in the village expects in the near future to send his children to retailers and shopkeepers to buy at very affordable prices qualitative Ever-ready Battery mai alamar Kyanwa, Omo mai Tsuntuwa and family sugar cubes – Sukari mai Iyali and that small tin of condensed milk for kids that they dubbed as Majinar Bature.

Mr. President, there is the urgent need to form a national think-tank on “Nigeria Renaissance”. And there is no time to waste on this very renaissance project. The national think-tank should constitute a syndicate of highly honest, dedicated, ambitious and excellent professionals who made a mark in their various fields of endeavours. The syndicate will be responsible for restoring Nigeria’s good image at home and abroad. Definitively, there is the need to rescue our image on corruption from the international community and the world over. There is also the need to urgently reach out to serious-minded people living within and in Diaspora. This renaissance project of fixing Nigeria will be perfect if you can get a helping hand from people such as Prof. Abba Gumel of Arizona State University, United States. Abba, I understand, is one of the best brains in the world. He is an international professor of Mathematics that combines mathematical theories and methodologies to gain insights into the behaviour of non-linear dynamical systems, which give rise to mathematical modeling phenomena, particularly on the transmission and control of human diseases of public health interest. He is today the number one African and world’s 6^th Mathematician as far as I could recall. Prof Abba needs to be convinced and invited to come over and help your government turn Nigeria a new leaf. Another person that is worth bringing on board by your government is Jelani Aliyu. He is today one of Nigeria’s brilliant minds working for General Motors. The facts I know about Jelani is that he’s one of the world’s best ten car designers that takes inspiration from nature and apply it to car design. He is currently the designer of the GM’s electric car – Chevrolet Volt. GM got its bailout finance from President Obama, because of Jelani’s Chevy Volt. He was the designer of Pontiac and Buick. At a point in time, he went to Germany and helped the Germans designed future status of Mercedes Benz. I am doing all I can to persuade Jelani to come back home and contribute his quota. Presently, I convinced him to partner with NITT, Zaria and help them develop courses that are essential to transportation design.

Again, there is Modupe Ozolua – social entrepreneur and philanthropist. She pioneered cosmetic surgery to West Africa at the age of 27. Modupe gives hope to the less privileged. The idea and wisdom behind the Nigeria renaissance project is to redeem its past glory in education, science, technology and leadership by removing corruption and dealing with corrupt people in totality from the Nigerian polity. The renaissance team composition must have a zero tolerance for corruption. One cannot be part of the team if he/she has an iota of corrupt history or tendency. Every serious nation has its national think-tank who does the homework of nation building. In US, for example, Craig Venter –the molecular biologist professor and entrepreneur has done wonders for his country by making a breakthrough in DNA sequencing more than its inventor, Crick Watson. Philip Anchutz – another US miner and entrepreneur has performed remarkably in boosting US economy through philanthropy. The US government listens to their advice and uses them on economic policies and development. In Singapore, late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew transformed more than an impoverished swampy island into the envy of the world using high profile professionals in all his key ministries, departments and agencies. Today, Singapore’s unemployment is just 2%. It is the third in the global education league. That country is the world’s healthiest nation. Ninety percent of Singaporeans own their own homes, which are mostly government built. It has the lowest crime level and is the least corrupt nation in the world. It’s public transport and places are clean. Courtesy of Lee Kuan Yew and his dedicated working class citizens.

Long live Mr. President. Long live Federal Republic of Nigeria.